Category Archives: Novels

Slam is a novel written by British author Nick Hornby. The novel published in 2007.

Slam is a story about sixteen years old boy called Sam. He lives with his single mother Annie in England. Skateboarding is Sam’s passion and Tom Hawk(familiarly called TH) is his huge idol. Sam has for example a TH’s poster on his wall. Sometimes Sam chats to TH’s poster and asks for help to different problems in his life. One day Sam meets a girl called Alicia, who is Sam’s mother’s co-worker’s daughter. Pair starts to date quite quickly. Everything seems to be allright until little accident happens with his girlfriend Alicia. You see, Alicia gets pregnant.

I think all characters in this book were felicitous. Main character Sam was easy-going and nice guy. He wasn’t rebel-teenager at all. Sam reminded even a nerd or loser little bit. He talked to the poster, which was pretty weird… However I liked Sam a lot. The book was written from his point of view so novel described Sam’s feelings about teenpregnancy and being father. I think Sam was real.
Other characters in book were also good. Sam’s mother Annie was as easy-going as her son. Their relationship was workable. They didn’t fight. Annie became a mother at a young age too so she understood his son’s situation.
Alicia was only person in the book, who I didn’t like at first. I think she was little spoiled and childish. Her parents were educated and old-fashioned and Alicia seemed shallow. Towards the end of book, Alicia became more responsible and she matured. From the beginning I wondered the relationship between Alicia and Sam. Alicia was described pretty and popular girl that everyone was in love with. Sam was instead little weird. I marveled why they started to date.

The main theme of the book is teenpregnancy. Book is also growth story of young man. Slam told about how hard experience teenpregnancy is and how much baby can change life. It described Sam’s feelings: he thought that he had no future. Sam experienced a lot of different feelings in book, so it was touching. For my surprise Slam was also very funny. I recommend to read this book no matter what age you are.

I had heard Nick Hornby’s book ”About a boy” and seen movie of the same name. The movie was good so I looked forward reading about Slam. And I liked Nick Hornby’s way to write. Language was simple and funny. Chapters were short enough. I liked also whole plot except few parts. These parts told about future and what Sam expects his life to be then. Otherwise plot moved ahead logically. Slam was really easy-reading book. I am not experienced reader but I understood every single word. I recommend this book for everyone.

Lähteet: Wikipedia

The Fault in Our Stars is written by John Green. It’s the multi-million worldwide bestseller. The book is a young adult novel and it has been published in 2012. It’s protagonists are Hazel Graze and Augustus Waters. They live in Indianapolis.

The book tells about their love story and life. Hazel and Augustus are both having cancer. They meet at the Cancer Kid Support Club and they fall in love. I think that the books backcover describes the book very well: ”The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning author John Green’s most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling and tragic business of being alive and in love”. The book tells the story from Hazel’s view. The story is really sad and touching.

The book’s main character Hazel is a sixteen year old girl, who has cancer. She has gotten a few more years to live because of her medical. Hazel lives with her parents and she’s the only child in their family. The other main character Augustus is twenty-one year old. He is having a cancer too. Augustus is attractive and smart and he fears oblivion. Augustus hadn’t been in proper school in three years and his parents used to be his two best friends. The other characters of the book are Isaac (who is Augustus’ best friend and he is also having cancer), Monica (Isaac’s girlfriend), Hazel’s parents, Augustus parents and sisters, Patrick (Support group leader), Peter Van Houten  (he is an author and Hazel and Augustus goes to Amsterdam to meet him) and Lidewij (Peter’s assistant).

My favorite part of the book is a part where they are travelling to Amsterdam, because it wasn’t so sad than many other parts of the book. The book evoked many feelings. In some parts it was funny and in other parts really sad. The atmosphere was pretty dark and sad because it focused quite much to cancer. The book was a bit difficult to read because it had some special words concerning cancer. There were also few poems which made reading a bit challenging.

I really liked the book because it was well written and had a good plot. I also liked that how the author described things. But I didn’t like that the plot revolved so much around cancer because it made the book’s atmosphere so sad and dark.

I would recommend this book to all those who like touching love stories.

What will happen to the world, that we know, in the future?

When I spotted the book in the library, I wondered, who wants to write a book about water and why. However I felt a constant need to read it because the intriguing back cover desciption appealed to me in an odd way. Figuratively I just wanted to gobble the book right away.

The author, Emmi Itäranta, being previously unknown to me has written the fascinating science fiction book ”Memory of Water” that was published in 2012. I never imagined that I would find myself reading a book of this genre but the reading experience turned out to be much more meaningful than I first tought. The story takes place in the future world and it clearly takes a stance on the global problems that we are facing now such as climate change and pollution. In my opinion Itäranta succeeded to create a breathtaking story where one’s moral and values defines who one truly is.

A century is being lived where fresh water has dried up from the world, polar ice caps have melted, oil wars have begun and people are doing their best to survive. The military supervises everything especially families water consumption which is limited. In addition both the heat and insects make life even more difficult than it already is. All the past world’s energy sources are replaced with solar panels. In the middle of this chaos lives Noria, a seventeen year-old finnish girl, who is very interested of the past world and its electric equipment. By following his father’s footsteps she is to become a teamaster, a watcher of water. The plot continues in the following way. One day Noria’s father takes her to a place that doesn’t exist, a hidden spring. The duty of a teamaster is to keep it as a secret. If the military found out about it, it would be destroyed just like all the other springs that have been found. As if the military is only privileged to enjoy the few luxuries that the world still has to offer.

Times get even rougher when a military officer Taro starts to compel Noria’s family to admid, having an extra water source. Furthermore, Noria’s mother migrates from the village and her father abruptly dies. Suddenly Noria has no one except Sanja, her best friend. Together they refurbish past world’s machines which they have found. For all that the girls don’t know to what purpose the machines are for. It appalled me, why they had not been told anything about the past world.

Noria tells about the hidden spring to Sanja whose family is desperately in need of fresh water. Inevitable the word about the spring started to expand not only to the villager’s ears but also to the military’s. Military officer Taro gives Noria two joyless choices because of her water crime. Death or life. She chooses the grimest one since Sanja had betrayed her by revealing the spring to Taro hoping for mercy to herself and Noria. In my point of view Sanja was just trying to save them both, even if they had to swallow their pride, but that wasn’t enough for Noria. Sanja’s desire to save herself and her family was beyond the desire to change the world. Sanja’s act isn’t wrong in my opinion because Noria on the other hand didn’t have anyone to protect anymore. They were just two girls whose life priorities were different. Noria wanted people to be equal and that the water could belong to everyone. Most of all she wanted the world to be different. At least that is how I see it.

Why does Noria have to die? If Noria had accepted Taro’s offer she had saved herself but wouldn’t have listened to her heart. She let her moral lead her decisions not fear or the promises she had made. She chose her own path which was in between being a teamaster and an obedient citizen.

I think Noria changed during the book. First she didn’t care so much about the others and she didn’t listen to her heart. She listened to her father, telling her to keep the spring as a secret. When she was all alone she understood how selfish she had been to only enjoy the spring herself when there were others dying in thirst.

To my delight the story is quite ambiguos and idealistic. A young girl sacrifices her life in order to make a difference in the world. Noria tried to change the world which we could have prevented in the first place. She was desperate to know why people before them didn’t care about the planet’s future. As in the book Sanja says to Noria, ” It’s not worth thinking about them, Noria. They didn’t think about us, either ”.

I think the story is trying to tell that we have to change something in our lifestyle now if we want to offer as good life circumstances to the next generation as possible. However, I feel that the book doesn’t only take a stance on global environmental problems but to equality and women rights. I want to believe that this story isn’t a prediction about our planet’s future. With this technolocy and knowledge that we now have I simply refuse to think that we couldn’t come up with any solution to prevent the environmental changes that was mentioned in the book.

His Last Bow is written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish author and creator of Sherlock Holmes. His Last Bow is in fact a collection of adventures experienced by Holmes told from the perspective of his assistant, Dr. Watson. The book, or a collection of books, was published in 1917 in Great Britain and it can definitely be noticed by the reader. The language was, in my opinion, hard and heavy to read. It felt like it had a weight on it but I guess that it is just a regular experience for a foreigner like me to read 100-year-old British English for a first time. Some words and clauses looked like totally alien to me and were obviously old but after a couple of pages I got used to it so I wouldn’t really consider it as a flaw. It’s all important part of the history after all.

The book consists of 8 chapters. Each chapters works as a separate story but are connected by the same timeline. The last chapter ’His Last Bow’ is an epilogue to the story of Holmes and tells about his after-war experience. So technically it shouldn’t matter in which order you read the stories as long as you keep ’His Last Bow’ as the last one, as they are only faintly connected to each other and every story has it’s own crime scene. For full experience, of course, you should read ALL the books about Sherlock Holmes published by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But if you just enjoy reading classical, old-school crime novels then this book would be a fine choice (coming from one who just read his first Sherlock Holmes book).

Shortly and summarized, if it wasn’t clear enough already, the book is mainly about Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr. Watson. Together they solve crimes in London and in it’s vicinity (mainly murders). There isn’t really anything special about them, they all feel really cliché and Holmes is the Gary-Stu of detectives. Maybe it’s just my bitterness and my incompetence to understand the early 19th century English, but one will realize eventually that although it’s far from good and nowhere near the perfect crime novel it’s still, after all, the father of all detective novels. Of course it feels cliché and hackneyed because it’s what most of the genre got it’s inspiration from. No one says that CRT televisions look too much like LCD televisions, do they.

In conclusion I think that if you have even a slight piece of interest in Sherlock Holmes and/or classic detective novels, give it a shot. It might feel like riding an old wooden roller coaster with little bumps on the tracks every so often but at the end of it, you might feel like queuing again for an another ride.

John Steinbeck, an author who has won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, wrote the short novel in 1937. Of Mice and Men has become one of the American classics. Plays and films have been made based on this novel. I became interested in reading Of Mice and Men after I watched the 1992 film directed by Gary Sinise. In his books, Steinbeck used to describe how it was like during the Great Depression in the 1930s. His stories normally told about the poor working class. Another well-known novel written by him is The Grapes of Wrath, which was published in 1939.

Of Mice and Men locates in California during the 1930s. The novella is a realistic description of migrant workers, who didn’t have homes and worked in ranches to earn money. Of Mice and Men deals with important themes such as friendship, trust, and loneliness. A big theme in the book is mental retardation and being different from others. The book also describes how people’s behavior changes depending on which people are around.

The two protagonists are named George and Lennie. George is a smart guy who doesn’t have big expectations for future. His goal is to have a regular job and a place to sleep. George takes care of mentally retarded Lennie. Together they move from a ranch to another looking for work. Lennie acts like a small child and his favorite thing in the whole world is touching soft things. Physically Lennie is stronger than average which makes him a good worker. However, he has problems with controlling his powers. Of Mice and Men tells how these men start working at a new ranch and what happens there.

The story is told by an omniscient narrator. Once in a while the language of the book was a bit challenging. I had to read out loud some of the men’s replies to understand what they meant. The men swore a lot and used some not-so-beautiful expressions for example about an African-American man, Croocks, who worked in the horse stable. However, these things made the story more realistic in my eyes. I think you can read some things between the lines when you’re focusing on the language of the book. ”George, how long’s it gonna be till we get that little place an’ live fatta the lan’ –an’ rabbits?” said on page 56 is a good example of Lennie’s replies. Personally, I most enjoyed Lennie’s childish way to speak.

Of Mice and Men shows how it is to be lonely and different. Lennie gets misunderstood and discriminated by other men because of things he isn’t able to chance. The same thing happens with Croocks. These two men seem to have many things in common. The only woman in the book also gets mocked quite often. She doesn’t get viewed as a person, but more as an annoying and good-looking wife of the boss’ son.

Another theme is friendship. The story tells about being a friend and how hard it can be. Steinbeck realistically pictures the friendship of the protagonists. George probably didn’t choose to start taking care of Lennie. He just knows that he can’t leave Lennie because he wouldn’t survive alone. Still, I’m not saying that George was always a good friend to Lennie. He often lost his patience and made Lennie feel bad about himself. Not to mention what happened at the end of the story. Of Mice and Men successfully tells the situation from Lennie’s point of view too. He truly wants to do the right thing but when he fails, he becomes scared of George being mad at him.

I haven’t read many English books, so this was a nice experience. For me, Of Mice and Men was an unusually short book. I am used to reading novels with more complicated plots and that’s why I didn’t get the idea of this one at first. After I had read more, I realized that maybe the plots of John Steinbeck’s books aren’t the reason why he is so appreciated. Steinbeck was extremely good at writing about those unfair and embarrassing things which belonged to peoples’ normal life.

What I liked was that Steinbeck didn’t create any unimportant characters or plot twists. Of Mice and Men may be a short story but it still manages to say all the necessary things. In this story the plot is not as important as the message. The book has a lot to say.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Mice_and_Men, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck,

Switched was originally first published as an e-book in 2010 by a young American writer, Amanda Hocking. Hocking first started as a group home worker, until 2010, when she wrote a whopping 17 novels in her free time. During the spring of 2010, she started to publish her books as e-books. And by 2011, she had sold over a million copies of her nine books and earned over two million dollars from sales. In March 2011, Hocking signed her very first book publishing contract with St. Martin’s Press. The contract included the publishing of her four books, three of which were apart of the Trylle series, which was re-released in January-April 2012. All of Hocking’s books are young adult fiction and they focus on paranormal romance. Also in February 2011, the Trylle series (thank goodness, I am so hyped for this!) was optioned for a film, with Terra Tatchell taking care of the screenplay.

Okay, so now let’s start with the book itself. I accidentally first picked out the second part of the series from the library and had to wait months to get my hands on the first part. And let me tell you, it was worth it! Switched got me hooked during the very first chapter and I just had to keep on reading and reading.
The book begins with the main character of the whole series, Wendy Everly, describing an awful incident that took place 11 years ago. Her mother, Kim, started accusing the 6-year old Wendy of being a monster and taking away her child. Things get out of hand, and Kim tries to kill Wendy, but only manages to cause a severe injury on her stomach. Ever since Kim got the newborn in her arms, she knew that this was not her child.
”I was pregnant, Wendy! But you’re not the child I gave birth to! Where is my child?” Tears formed in her eyes and I shook my head. ”You probably killed him, didn’t you?

Kim gets transported to a psychiatric hospital and Wendy is left with her aunt Maggie and  her big brother, Matt. Both of them are ready to do whatever it takes to make Wendy’s life wonderful because of her awful childhood. Wendy and her small little family move to a new house, meaning that Wendy is switching schools, again. Wendy wasn’t really the best student, to me she seemed like one of those people who just sit in class and don’t pay attention and just want to go home. One day Wendy notices that a newcomer, Finn, can’t keep his eyes off of her, which first comes out rather creepy. At the school dance, Finn asks Wendy to dance with him. The dancing goes well, until Finn starts to insult Wendy, and she gets pissed. She manages to get a guy to take her home by using a secret ability she has no idea of.
I clenched my fists and looked Patrick directly in his eyes. I didn’t like doing this when people watched, but I had to get out of here. I kept chanting what I wanted over and over in my head.
After the little scene at the dance, Finn mysteriously shows up outside of Wendy’s bedroom window, wanting to tell her about things that will truly turn her life upside down.

I was going to go further with the plot, but I don’t want to ruin it for people who probably haven’t read the book, yet.
Okay, so like I said before, the main character of the story is Wendy Everly, a 17-year-old young high schooler who has had a tough childhood. To me, Wendy really seemed like a self-centered, short-tempered person, but she is also very kind to the people she loves. As the story goes on, the way she acts totally changes and she turns into a whole new person. Aunt Maggie, who after the horrible incident became Wendy’s guardian, is a loving person and really cares for her niece. Sadly, you don’t get to hear much about Maggie because she kind of gets ”forgotten” mid-way through the book. Wendy’s loving big brother is the kind that I’m sure everyone would want. Matt is really caring and protective of his sister and would definitely take a bullet for her. Finn, the mysterious newcomer, is a really interesting person. He is really hard to describe, but it seems like he has this huge wall built around him and won’t let his emotions get through it. On the inside, he’s a really caring and loving person, who wants for other people to be happy. He doesn’t care if it’ll make him feel miserable, as long as you’re happy, he’s happy.

The places where the story takes place, are described wonderfully, and you can just imagine that you’re actually there, with the characters. There’s a lot of details, and the way the characters are acting and feeling can also be seen quite well. It’s like you could see what’s going through their minds and know what they’re truly thinking of.
The story has some kind of a love triangle that’s slowly developing, but it can be seen better in the two other books.

I truly enjoyed the book, I’d talk about it non-stop and everything was just so.. lovely. The whole series just takes your breath away and the plot is filled with unexpected twists etc. I would recommend this book to everyone, who loves a little bit of action and fantasy in their books. I have no clue if this book has been published in Finnish, but I recommend reading it in English because usually details and everything are described better in the original language, rather than the translated one. And how did it feel to read an English novel? Well, in English, you can describe things way better because you can use multiple words to describe just one small thing, when in Finnish, that’s not the case. This was the  very first English novel I’ve read fully, and it for sure won’t be my last. Anyway, I’m sure people who have read books such as the Hunger Games, Twilight etc. would enjoy many of Amanda Hocking’s books.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Hocking, www.bookchickcity.com/2012/07/review-switched-by-amanda-hocking.html